In a network architecture of a distributed gateway, a local area network (English: local area network, LAN for short) includes multiple gateways. When a host changes its gateway, a Media Access Control (English: Media Access Control, MAC for short) address and an Internet Protocol (English: Internet Protocol, IP for short) address of the host are not changed. A packet forwarding manner in the distributed gateway architecture is that, regardless of whether a host sending a packet and a host receiving the packet are located in a same broadcast domain (English: broadcast domain, BD for short), the sender host sends the packet to a gateway of the sender host, and the gateway sends the packet to the receiver host according to a destination IP address of the packet. The receiver host may access a network by using another gateway in the local area network. Therefore, a forwarding table of the gateway of the sender host needs to include host routes of all hosts that access a network by using another gateway in the local area network. When the local area network includes a large quantity of hosts, a large quantity of host routes occupy many storage resources of the forwarding table.